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The Amazing Spider-Man Discussion

This is a thread to talk about about everybody's favorite wise cracking wallcrawler, Spider-Man. And the narrative brutality he suffers through.

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I love the Spider-Man comic(he is by far my favorite superhero). I have since i was a small child. At some point i stopped reading though and only got back into the comics recently(about at the start of the Marvel Civil War).

Rant begins here...
Just in time to witness one of the most abhorrent plot decisions that i ever witnessed. Resetting the universe to prevent M.J. and Parker from staying together and to return his identity to being a secret; through M.J. making a deal with Mephisto(the devil basically). All supposedly to bring Aunt May back from the dead, who should be 20 years older than professor Farnsworth(from Futurama) by now.

My problem with this isn't that M.J. and Peter Parker were separated nor that Spider-man's identity is a mystery once again. It's that in order to do it the writer used such a classless, unimaginative, and obviously Dues Ex Machina method to do it.

If they wanted M.J gone they should have just killed her off. This is comics we're talking about, death is not a permanent condition. If they want her back they can bring her back. Death is like the common cold in the marvel universe, unless the character is on their last legs to begin with, give them some time and they will get over it.

And if they wanted Parkers identity to return to being a mystery they should have set up an elaborate ruse(like they always do).

But no, the writers/editors were either feeling lazy or exercised awful personal judgment and let this disaster happen. And the worst thing is that they never did ANYTHING with it. I mean if they had intended to do something like moving Ms. Marvel in (whose comic was cancelled anyway) as a supporting character/new love interest i could have forgiven it. But they basically did nothing. His new squeeze is exactly the same as the old one except for being far less interesting. And his daily life almost the same. He's got a new day job a new more boring girlfriend and that's it!

What do you think about it?

Last edited by Iceiphoenix; April 05, 2013 at 09:04 AM.
Reason: Added prefix

Re: The Amazing Spider-Man Discussion

OMD was so terrible that it's funny. While I personally don't care all that much for MJ, being a Gwen Stacy fan, it seem ridicules to go through the whole making a deal with the devil route when supposedly having them get a divorce was morally wrong. I don't even see what was wrong with divorce, considering it's not like a bunch of ten year-olds are the ones reading the comic. Adults, people who know about and probably have dealt with it before are the ones who are reading it. Especially when the whole point of Quesada wanting them broken up was so that they could get back to telling "good" Spider-man stories. Honestly, so far the majority of the stories they have told suck and could have been told while he was still married, well except for him hooking up with various women and the whole Big Time arc which was actually very enjoyable.

Anyway, screwing up twenty years of continuity just to try and make him "younger" was moronic and unnecessary, since they had Ultimate/Marvel Adventures Spider-man for all that sort of stuff. Plus the fact that it basically meant that Peter was still living with his aunt all that time is very weird. A divorce or even having the two take a break apart would have worked out far better and still given the same results. Not like it would have been very hard to come up with a reason for it. I'm sure being married to a superhero would be stressful and such.

Re: The Amazing Spider-Man Discussion

Spidey was and is and will be my all-time favourite comic book hero, and it started back than when I was a kid and I was bought by my parents my first comic book with Spidey <there were of course others, like <especially> Batman and Superman titles xd> ^^ The prescription for a very good comic book character - I think Stan Lee really knew HOW to do it, not making the hero "perfect" in every sense. Srsly, I could go on and on why I like him, but I did it many times in different places and I'm tired of this already <I mean: I'm not so much into Marvel comic books nowadays like I was> Just to sum up: other than Spidey I also always liked Batman & Superman from DC comic books <weird? maybe, but thats the case for me: every one of this three "big" guys has sth which fascinates me, whether its the hero or the universe and its villains>

Resetting Spidey by Joe Quesada - so much controversy about it, hehe, back in the day many ppl were talking/writing so much about it, I was also <pl board for Spidey> Now that I think about it: I would need to search my post when I sincerely just freakin' went nuts over this event .. and I'm not proud of that. Actually, it was more based than being objective, and I don't want to search for that or to write about this. I think both Jammin & Rikudou King wrote what I really think about this, and I especially like this:

Originally Posted by Jammin

My problem with this isn't that M.J. and Peter Parker were separated nor that Spider-man's identity is a mystery once again. It's that in order to do it the writer used such a classless, unimaginative, and obviously Dues Ex Machina method to do it.

Exactly. For all I care now, Quesada could just make them divorced, could make MJ being killed, could make.. and so on and so forth. The thing is: Quesada didn't have balls to do it - and I don't want to say I don't like Spidey titles anymore, I'm just saying that it seems like this being not "perfect" was not supposed to be in the case of Peter Parker; I mean, if Spidey would get divorced with MJ, or MJ would be killed because eg. he hadn't saved her, Quesada probably thought: "no, oh my god, it would be too much stain <or how its called> on Spidey's character, no, NO, NOOO, he's almost too perfect to make him have an ex-wife or sth." And WHY not!? He was to be "normal" than many other comic book heroes? It should be considered sth normal, especially if it meant for Spidey. That said: I think you got my drill xd

Re: The Amazing Spider-Man Discussion

I couldn't agree with what you both said more.

It's been such a long road for spider-man comic to recover from what Quesada did. I mean, in order to regain some of the quality it lost by discarding the years of work by all the writers before him, spider-man has actually gone in the opposite direction of "a return to a more classic hero" Which was the justification for what he did. With stuff like the lizard murdering his own son and the murders the hobgoblin, Madam Web, and Spider-man's (final?)clone the spider-man comic has never been darker.

Like Rikudou King I was not a huge M.J. fan(i also liked Gwen Stacy better), but i think i mighty actually hate Carley Cooper. She brings nothing to the story but boredom and a few CSI references. It's ironic that Quesada had her named for his daughter.

I think at this point the comic needs to just move past it all. Show Spider-man more involved in the Avengers business or something. Not the stupid Fantastic Four;whom nobody cares about(Marvel keeps a top 10 list of subscriptions going, it never cracks the top 10) because they are the kind of purest heroes that Quesada wanted Spider-man to be.

Spider-man lately has been more interesting outside of his own comic. He is by far the best reason to read "New Avengers", and his absurd amount of guest spots are also invariably great. And it would be so easy to bring that stuff into his own comic. I mean, with all the traveling to other comics he does, the authors could pick new love interests, supporting characters, and villains from ANYWHERE.

Re: The Amazing Spider-Man Discussion

Just when you think One More Day couldn't be topped in terms of atrocious writing....apparently in #700 the bar gets set a little higher.

All that's out so far are spoilers (if you want to check it out, here's the bad news) but... sweet Jesus. Anybody who thought this was a good idea must have been completely out of there mind. Apparently Dan Slott has already gotten death threats over this, which is an overreaction obviously, but what kind of reaction did they expect? I'm forecasting a Category 5 hatestorm for Spiderman in the next 3 months or so (at least).

I assume it's temporary but it's hard not consider the "Superior Spiderman" moniker of the MarvelNOW comic extremely ironic.

Re: The Amazing Spider-Man Discussion

Still hoping it' just one big major hoax by Dan Slott, cause honestly he's too good of a writer to think that would ever be accepted. If it does turn out to be true, at least people will stop complaining about Ultimate Spiderman.

Re: The Amazing Spider-Man Discussion

Originally Posted by Rikudou King

Still hoping it' just one big major hoax by Dan Slott, cause honestly he's too good of a writer to think that would ever be accepted. If it does turn out to be true, at least people will stop complaining about Ultimate Spiderman.

It's doesn't seem like it's a hoax. Some print copies of the issue showed up on ebay and the last few pages got released onto the internet. What is the upside for doing that?

So unless they change something between now and the ship date of December 26th(which would be a REALLY good idea, IMO)....

Otto Octavian is walking around in Peter Parker's body with all his memories and a new found resolve to be a better Spider-man than Parker ever was. Superior Spiderman seems to refer to his belief that he's superior to the original Peter Parker and his desire to prove that, so that fits too.

To be honest, Slott recently has been on a losing streak. His Alpha plot-line, essentially a super-powered sidekick story that went nowhere. Before that was Spider Island which was pretty mediocre. I love the way Dan Slott writes Spiderman's dialogue but his last plot work that I thought was "good" was probably The Gauntlet or The Grim Hunt . It's been a while since then (he wasn't the only writer during that time either).

I'm convinced enough that I canceled my subscription. In comics nothing is forever and I'm sure things will come around, as they always do, but for now I'm out.

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As for Ultimate Spiderman, my impression was that fans are somewhat split on that. Miles Morales is pretty popular but many, myself included, want Peter Parker back.

I could actually see this put more pressure on to make that happen instead of less too. Because normally, when Marvel fudges up the 616 Universe version of somebody, fans flood to the Ultimate Universe until it blows over. In Peter Parker's case, he's dead in one and worse than dead in the other. We Spidy fans are running out of alternate universes.